Thu, 04 Jun 2015

This is the second post about the coding club at my kid's school. I was away for four weeks travelling for work and then getting sick, so I am still getting back up to speed with what the kids have been up to while I've been away. This post is an attempt to gather some resources that I hope will be useful during the session today -- it remains to be seen how this maps to what the kids actually did while I was away.

First off, the adults have decided to give Python for Kids a go as a teaching resource. The biggest catch with this book is that its kind of expensive -- at AUD $35 a copy, we can't just issue a copy to every kid in the room. That said, perhaps the kids don't each need a copy, as long as the adults are just using it as a guide for what things to cover.

It appears that while I was away chapters 1 through 4 have been covered. 1 is about install python, and then 2-3 are language construct introductions. This is things like what a variable is, mathematical operators, strings, tuples and lists. So, that's all important but kind of dull. On the other hand, chapter 4 covers turtle graphics, which I didn't even realize that python had a module for.

I have fond memories of doing logo graphics as a kid at school. Back in my day we'd sometimes even use actual robots to do some of the graphics, although most of it was simulated on Apple II machines of various forms. I think its important to let the kids of today know that these strange exercises they're doing used to relate to physical hardware that schools actually owned. Here are a couple of indicative pictures stolen from the Internet:

So, I think that's what we'll keep going with this week -- I'll let the kids explain where they got to with turtle graphics and then we'll see how far we can take that without it becoming a chore.